Antonio Berni was born in Rosario, Argentina in 1905.

Berni had his first exhibition when he was still a teenager and received a scholarship to study painting in Europe in 1925. After visiting Madrid, he settled in Paris, where he studied with the painters André Lhote and Othon Friesz. He received a second scholarship in 1927 that introduced him to Surrealism. While in France he explored Surrealism, revolutionary politics, and the psychoanalytical writings of Sigmund Freud. He began to produce paintings and collages that reflected the influence of Surrealism and of Giorgio de Chirico in particular.

Berni returned to Argentina in 1930. In 1933 he established a leftist group called Nuevo Realismo (“New Realism”) and began to prefer Social Realism. That same year he collaborated on a mural with the Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros. Unlike the muralists of Mexico, however, Berni had little opportunity to paint murals, so instead, he used enormous mural-sized canvases. An example of this is Public Demonstration (1934), which captures the desperation of Argentina’s working classes. The anguished faces of men, women, and a child crowd the image; one protester holds a sign that reads “pan y trabajo” (“bread and work”).

Berni continued to produce work in this realist style until the late 1950s when he began a series of collages that he centered on the daily life of a fictional boy from the slums of Buenos Aires whom he named Juanito Laguna. Juanito Laguna Goes to the City (1963). In this work and others, Berni included objects and materials that he collected in the slums—bits of paper, cardboard, newspaper, fabric, and metal. In the early 1960s, the fictional prostitute and seamstress Ramona Montiel became the subject of his second series of works. He also produced a number of prints centered on these characters.

In the seventies, Berni continued his series of Juanito and Ramona while in other works he addressed issues related to violence and repression. Berni’s work gradually became more spiritual and reflective. In 1980 he completed the paintings Apocalipsis (Apocalypse) and La crucifixion (The Crucifixion) for the Chapel of San Luis Gonzaga in Las Heras.

Antonio Berni died on October 13, 1981, in Buenos Aires where he had been working on a Martín Fierro monument. The monument was inaugurated in San Martín on November 17 of the same year.

AWARDS:

-Stimulus Prize of the Fall Hall of Rosario (1925)

-Second Prize: acquisition of the “Municipality of the Federal Capital” at the XXVI National Exhibition (1936)

-First Prize National Hall Painting (1940)

-Prize Acquisition Martin Rodriguez Galisteo in the XVIII Santa Fe Hall (1941)

-Great Engraving and Drawing Prize of the XXXI International Biennial of Art of Venice (1962)

-Prize of the I International Biennial of Engraving of Krakow (1966)

-Prize to the Intergraph Exhibition in Berlin (1967)